Sharon Stone, Billy Baldwin and the salacious Sliver feud that won’t die

How two stars who hated each other, a coke-addled producer and many censor-troubling sex scenes created a controversy that rages to this day.

Ever since her breakthrough performance in Paul Verhoeven’s erotic blockbuster Basic Instinct, Sharon Stone has been no stranger to controversy. Yet her recent claim that the producer Robert Evans tried to pressure her into having sex with her Sliver co-star Billy Baldwin to improve his performance is the latest jaw-dropper in a life full of them. She had previously called Evans “one of the most bizarre human beings I ever encountered in the film business, and one of the most inappropriate”.

In her recollection, Evans asked her to do this on the 1993 film so that “Billy Baldwin’s performance would get better, and we needed Billy to get better in the movie because that was the problem”. Stone refused, and so Evans and Baldwin reportedly proceeded to make her life hell: all for the sake of attempting to sex up a third-rate “erotic thriller” that tried, and failed, to piggyback off the far greater success she had enjoyed in Basic Instinct. It would give rise to one of the nastiest and most persistent Hollywood feuds of the past few decades, full of distasteful (and at times hilarious) rumours and details, and which shows no signs of coming to an end.

The pair’s off-screen mutual loathing led to the picture being changed so they had as little to do with each other in the love scenes as possible. Given the extraordinarily bad relationship Baldwin and Stone had, the chances of Evans’ wishes being agreed to were somewhere far below zero.

Stone alluded to the unpleasant experience that she had undergone in her 2021 memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice, in which she wrote that an anonymous producer “explained to me why I should f*** my co-star so that we could have on-screen chemistry”. Her understandable response was to note that “nobody’s that good in bed”.

She has always made it clear that she did not sleep with the other actor, and on the Louis Theroux podcast, she has named both Evans and Baldwin. The producer attempted to blame Stone for her co-star’s woodenness. As she recalled: “The real problem with the movie was me because I was so uptight, and so not like a real actress who could just f*** him and get things back on track. The real problem was I was such a tight a***.”

Baldwin has not taken the criticism well. He responded on X that he was “not sure why Sharon Stone keeps talking about me all these years later? Does she still have a crush on me or is she still hurt after all these years because I shunned her advances?” He claimed that Stone told her friend Janice Dickinson that “I’m gonna make him fall so hard for me, it’s gonna make his head spin” (Dickinson denied this) and concluded with a threat. “I have so much dirt on her it would make her head spin but I’ve kept quiet,” he said. “Wonder if I should write a book and tell the many, many disturbing, kinky and unprofessional tales about Sharon? That might be fun.”

Baldwin may need to do so, as his own career has not remained at the heights of Stone’s. While, post-Sliver, she went on to work with Martin Scorsese on Casino (and was nominated for an Oscar), Baldwin’s highest-profile subsequent appearance was a self-parodying cameo in the 2008 comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Still, he is acting – most recently in the Serbian TV series South Wind.

Robert Evans, who died in 2019, led a long, eventful life that included everything from the highs of overseeing the production of The Godfather, Chinatown and Marathon Man to the lows of a 1980 conviction for cocaine trafficking and subsequent involvement with largely undistinguished films. His 1994 autobiography, The Kid Stays in the Picture, is a classic film memoir, although it is silent on both Sliver and his relationship with Stone.

On paper, the picture should have been his great comeback. It was based on a novel by Ira Levin, whose hit Rosemary’s Baby had been shepherded to the screen by Evans, and his agent instructed him to “get on your knees and try to get this project”. The storyline revolved around a New York book editor who becomes involved with a charismatic video game designer and an enigmatic novelist and tries to solve a murder in the apartment building in which she now lives.

It was gripping, unusual and ended with an audience-baiting conclusion that suggested that the killer escaped justice, a la Basic Instinct. Through a mixture of charm and strong-arming, Evans managed to buy the rights off Levin for US$500,000, and used the deal that he put together to return to the Paramount lot, where he had been persona non grata since his drugs bust.

At first, all went well. Evans hired the Basic Instinct screenwriter Joe Eszterhas for less than a third of the US$3 million fee that he usually charged, and after Rosemary’s Baby director Roman Polanski turned down the opportunity to work on another Levin picture – on the grounds that he was unable to return to the United States thanks to the extradition order against him – Evans hired Dead Calm and Patriot Games director Phillip Noyce, whose earlier films had shown his ready facility with suspense.

Sliver needed a star, though, and Evans used a combination of charm and steel to woo Stone into taking the lead. She had a good existing relationship with Eszterhas, as the two had bonded while battling Basic Instinct’s many critics. (According to Eszterhas, they became lovers during the course of production.) Yet she was not bowled over by the script; Noyce later said, “Sharon didn’t really want to do Sliver, and when you have a lead that’s not into the film, things can get tricky.” She feared typecasting and knew that while her iconic Basic Instinct lead Catherine Tramell had made her a star, the quieter, less dynamic role of Carli Norris was unlikely to have a similar effect.

Eszterhas talked her into taking the part. Noyce observed the close relationship between star and writer in a meeting between the three of them: “Things got very interesting when Sharon started to give Joe a spontaneous massage, and he started moaning from her nimble fingers.” Evans, meanwhile, bluffed, “knowing a woman’s head about competitiveness with other women”. He told Stone that Demi Moore and Geena Davis were both desperate to do the film if she turned it down, and promised that, “If this picture works, you have a bounty tag, a price tag that’s higher than anybody in the industry.” Basic Instinct, in his sales pitch, had been the foreplay; Sliver would be the real deal. He later admitted that he’d never even sent Moore or Davis the script.

Stone was seduced, signed on for a fee of US$2.5m, and a budget of US$33m was agreed. Her co-stars would be Tom Berenger, still coasting the Oscar nomination he had received for Platoon, and Baldwin, then a hot property thanks to the success of hits such as Backdraft and Flatliners. Sliver, if it worked, would launch him into the stratosphere, just as it would Stone.

The on-screen relationship between the two was vital. Stone had wanted to cast a then-little-known Brad Pitt opposite her – showing the same excellent taste in up-and-coming stars that she later demonstrated when she insisted on Leonardo DiCaprio being cast in her western The Quick and the Dead – but Noyce refused. “I’d already fallen in love with William Baldwin, though. I loved how mysterious, and how restrained he was in his acting style,” he said. As he later admitted: “I was wrong.”

Initially, Stone felt sorry for Baldwin. She had enjoyed an excellent relationship with her Basic Instinct co-star Michael Douglas, and hoped to recapture the same chemistry – famously quipping on set that “it takes a while for me to calm the men down” on the days they were due to perform love scenes – but was disappointed by the less experienced actor. As she told the New Yorker: “Billy was so sweet and young and naive. He had no idea what these monster men were up to. I was speaking studio-man talk very fluently by the time I got on the set of Sliver, and Billy was still a kid. They threw him in the deep, deep end of the pool.”

She tried to be professional, suggesting that he come to her trailer to work on their scenes together; something that Baldwin, leant on by Evans, misinterpreted. As she later recalled: “He was trying to be appropriate… I don’t think he realised that I really wanted to work on the scenes, because they were pushing alternative realities very hard on both of us.”

The chemistry dissipated, and the relationship between the actors became dire. Stone soon insisted that she would play her close-ups opposite a double, rather than with her loathed co-star. Baldwin, meanwhile, quipped after one reluctantly performed love scene that Stone had “thin lips, okay breath”, and begged Evans to allow him to choreograph the climatic sex scene so that he wouldn’t have to kiss Stone during it.

She, meanwhile, asked why Evans hadn’t made the effort to pay for a talented or at least competent co-star – “someone who could deliver a scene and remember his lines”. Eszterhas suggested that, during one intimate scene, Stone bit Baldwin’s tongue so hard that he had difficulty speaking for days, leading her to riposte, “I think it’s hilarious. I knew (Joe) was funny, but I didn’t think he could write comedy.”

Apart from the difficulties between Stone and Baldwin, the production was a troubled one, with the budget swiftly rising from US$33m to US$40m, with rumours putting it as high as US$50m. It did not help that the ending, which Eszterhas and Noyce had intended to be daring and provocative, was changed at the last minute. As the director recalled: “The original ending as written by Eszterhas had the two lovers flying over an active volcano in Hawaii and, as an extension of the erotic charge that the two characters were always searching for, the film ended on this impressionistic note as if they were headed straight for the molten lava.”

It was not popular with the studio, or test audiences. “Needless to say, the audience wasn’t going to see Sliver for an art-house ending,” shrugged Noyce. “Not that the eventual ending was any more concrete, either.” It had originally suggested that Baldwin’s character was the killer, and that Stone was so in love with him that this became irrelevant. A ham-fisted last-minute reshoot saw Berenger become the murderer instead, removing any hint of moral ambiguity or interest from the picture.

Berenger, meanwhile, had long since tired of the lack of professionalism from both his co-stars and director, eventually exploding at Noyce during the reshoots that he was “sneaking around and manipulating” the cast, while Evans fretted and exhorted from the sidelines. When asked by one journalist how his relationship with Stone was, he equivocated. “Every close-up she does is great. A switch just goes on, lights go on. Selfish, maybe. She’s no walk in the park. Charm? Like a barracuda. I wouldn’t want to live with her. But I’d sure as hell want to work with her again.” Predictably, he never did.

Once Sliver was completed, the sexual content was, predictably, too much for America’s ratings board, the MPAA, which announced that it would be given the kiss-of-death NC-17 classification unless it was edited. Evans, by now fearful for his big comeback, shouted “F*** them! Let’s just go for the NC-17″, before suffering a heart attack, brought on by the stress (and, possibly, his continued cocaine use). Noyce, unencumbered by his producer, dutifully made 110 edits to the film to ensure a more commercially successful R rating.

In the end, it was a box office hit, thanks to Stone’s commercial pulling power, although it made less than a third of Basic Instinct’s gross. The reviews were dismal, with many suggesting that Stone was miscast as a withdrawn book editor, and the sexual content was ridiculed; a scene in which Stone masturbates in a bathtub while Baldwin watches on CCTV came in for particular criticism. Everyone involved in the picture shrugged and moved on, and Baldwin never did become a big star. Yet the bad blood between him and Stone, three decades after Sliver’s release, remains more interesting – and compelling – than anything that is shown on screen.